Product Description
My first string quartet draws a lot of inspiration from early 20th century composers, which perhaps might be my favorite era of
classical music. I am oft inspired by the music from Stravinsky, Nielsen, and Debussy, among others. However, the
composer to have the most influence on me for the past few years is Bartok, and I believe it is evident in this
work as well. I loved Bartok's use of the tritone as a tonal center, the vast and frequent changes of tempo,
and the multitude of textural colors and extended techniques in his works. Most of the extended
techniques are found in the second movement, an example of which is the Bartok pizzacatto, which today is
a commonly found and utilized articulation. But I also have some newer techniques such as aleotoric
passages, originally created by composers such as Charles Ives and Henry Crowell and which saw more
prominent usage through the likes of John Cage and Witold Lutosławski, are still quite new and fresh
compositional tools. The third movement is much more song-like and tonal in nature than the first two
movements, but really adapts Bartok's style of changing the tempo often to bridge different sections.
Ultimately, I see the quartet as a microcosm of the music I want to continue writing in the future, not
over-indulging in the intellectual exercises of mid-to-late 20th and 21st century classical music, while at the
same time not relying on the tonal and emotional tropes of the past.
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